He showered, brushed his teeth, and changed into clean clothes. It felt heavenly. He called Lisa again. Voice mail. He packed up their stuff and checked out, but waited in the lobby for two hours. He tried Lisa’s cell yet again and still nothing. He texted her:

I tried CALLING you. Waited at the hotel until 2. where the FUCK are you??? I’m going home. CALL ME PLEASE!!

Luke’s concern increased as he drove the one hundred miles back to their house in Sherman Oaks. He ran through dozens of possibilities. Maybe she’d finally left him and was cooling off with a sister or friend. Maybe some fucker had roofied her martini and she was tied up on a couch somewhere. Maybe she was still partying, snorting coke in the back of a stretch limo, on her way to Vegas.

He called her name as he opened their front door, not expecting a response and not getting one. He walked through their spacious house, then out to the pool. No sign of her.

His anxiety grew. It crawled onto his shoulders and pressed down. He couldn’t eat. He could barely breathe. Desperate, he called Lisa’s best friend, her producer, her manager. Nobody had heard from her. Not a single text, and that was unusual.

Something had happened to her. Something bad. Luke became more certain of this with every passing minute.

His agent called a little before six. It was Friday. Luke recalled that they’d scheduled a call for that afternoon to talk about the Netflix original he’d signed on to, but that wasn’t what this was about.

“What the fuck, Luke?”

“Yeah, sorry I missed our call. I’ve got other shit on my mind.”

“Forget the damn call. You’ve gone viral. Again.”

Marty sent the photograph that the jogger had taken that morning, which had already been picked up by national news groups and speculated upon widely.

“This is nothing,” Luke said to Marty, an irritated note in his voice. “I got blind drunk last night and woke up in the woods. Some douchebag took a picture of me. Big fucking deal.”

“But the blood,” Marty said.

“Yeah. Nosebleed, I guess. I don’t know.” Luke turned a slow circle, gazing around his lonely living room. His heart thumped heavily. “Listen, I can’t talk right now. I haven’t seen or heard from Lisa all day. I don’t know where she is and I’m starting to freak.”

“She’s missing?” Marty drew a sharp breath, which was followed by three or four seconds of edgy silence. Maybe Luke was too emotional to grasp the significance of a missing wife and a bloodstained shirt, but Marty was not. He connected the two ominous dots quickly, then stuttered something about having to feed the cat and hung up.

Luke called the police at nine p.m.